Newark: Where Opportunity Meets Excellence Spring 2017 Update
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Rutgers University – Newark: Where Opportunity Meets Excellence Spring 2017 Update Rutgers University – Newark: Where Opportunity Meets Excellence Spring 2017 Update Introduction The Rutgers University – Newark Strategic Plan was composed following an expansive, inclusive, highly democratic listening process designed to an answer to three questions: . What is higher education being called upon to do right now? . What is our story at Rutgers University–Newark? . If this is our moment, what shall we do? Our collective response constitutes an ambitious agenda to take on pressing global and local challenges, recognizing our location as both a defining influence in our story and a distinctive strength. Newark, New Jersey, is a great American city, the state’s largest and among America’s oldest, where the great challenges facing the growing metropolitan areas across our nation and around the world can be found, as can the assets needed to take on those challenges. The plan commits us to honoring and advancing our legacies: cultivating generations of talented students from a breathtaking diversity of backgrounds who clearly see and highly value education as the road to opportunity; supporting faculty in their work to produce high-impact scholarship, engage the community, and prepare these students for professional success and informed citizenship in an increasingly complex world; and supporting our staff, who are committed to advancing an inclusive campus culture focused on excellence. We recognized from the beginning of our planning process that work like this can never be finished, so our plan was written not as a recipe, but, reflecting the metaphor employed by Chancellor Cantor in its introduction, as a jazz score: establishing themes, but leaving ample room for creativity to emerge through improvisation. Reflecting this approach, the plan is organized around eight Strategic Priorities to guide our work, supplemented by four Action Modes to spur immediate action on issues and projects advancing those priorities. Strategic Priorities 1. Invest in collaboration in academic and research programs 2. Invest in our students 3. Invest in our faculty and graduate and professional students 4. Value our professional and support staff as key to our success 5. Invest in the spaces and places where we live, learn, create, and engage the world 6. Invest in anchor institution collaboration 7. Leverage our diversity and building civic dialogue 8. Tell the Rutgers University–Newark story more effectively Action Mode 1: The responsibility of Rutgers University–Newark’s leadership Action Mode 2: Strategic seed-grants Action Mode 3: Creating a sustained understanding of the challenge we face: Strategic Plan Working Groups 1 Rutgers University – Newark: Where Opportunity Meets Excellence Spring 2017 Update New Professoriate Staffing for the New Mission Anchor Institution Strategy Leveraging Diversity Action Mode 4: Cross-Cutting initiatives – taking a big step forward: Honors Living-Learning Community Since the Strategic Plan was finished in summer 2014, a great deal of progress has been made in pursuit of all of these, many identified explicitly in the plan and some that arose through creative, strategic development processes inspired by the plan’s themes. The present document presents a summary of highlights from that work. To describe our progress in pursuit of this plan as succinctly as we can for the purpose of informing the Rutgers-wide Middle States Decennial Review self-study, we have organized this update into four broad categories of activities that reveal the highly integrated approach we have taken to addressing our Strategic Priorities and Action Modes articulated in the plan. Contents 1. Student Programs Page Page 3 2. Faculty and Academic Programs 13 3. Anchor Institution Work 30 3.a. Strong, Healthy, Safe Communities 31 3.b. Arts & Culture 36 3.c. Education 39 3.d. Urban Economic Development 43 3.e. Science in the Urban Environment 49 4. Telling Our Story 53 Numerous programs, projects, and initiatives have been undertaken, the success of which has carried forward the optimism and energy of our faculty, staff, and students evident in our strategic planning process. We can only hope to describe here a representative sample. We invite follow-up questions should the reader wish additional detail on any aspect of our collective work. 2 Rutgers University – Newark: Where Opportunity Meets Excellence Spring 2017 Update 1. Student Programs Our students are at the center of our strategic plan—who they are, what their incredibly diverse backgrounds are, and how they represent generations of opportunity seekers who came to Rutgers University – Newark before them, as well as the increasingly diverse generations to come. They are the force that perhaps more than any other has made our university what it is today, reflected in our having sought and earned designation by the White House as a Hispanic Serving Institution. With this centering thought in mind and our strategic plan as a guide, we have undertaken numerous initiatives over the past three years—some aiming to serve students directly, others indirectly—to recognize them as our greatest asset and to do the best we can by them. Enrollment We set a goal to increase our enrollment of students from Newark and Greater Newark, recognizing that among the most effective ways that we could answer the question, “What is higher education being called upon to do right now?” would be to increase the number of students from our community who attend college. This is not a mere numbers game, but a commitment to work hand-in-glove with K-12 education and many partners on increasing college readiness so that more students from our community are prepared for college. We are on track to meet our goal of increasing enrollment by 1,000 and to achieve our goals to increase student success. This work started with the recognition that we needed to intertwine seamlessly our human resources of Academic Affairs and Student Affairs to bridge, even blur, traditional organizational boundaries so that we more clearly recognize and more strongly support “the whole student.” Among the signature efforts undertaken in pursuit of our strategic vision across the full breadth of those functions are the following. RUNways Building upon the foundations of the federally funded Garden State LSAMP and Bridges to the Baccalaureate programs, RUN has worked with its most important transfer-in institutions, including neighboring Essex County College and nearby Passaic and Hudson County Community Colleges, to create academic pathways for transfer students in high- demand disciplines such as biology, criminal justice, supply chain management, and the arts. These pathways—which we refer to collectively as RUNways—consist of perspicuous step-by-step guidance for students and counselors of course sequences that are aligned with respect to prerequisites and outcomes, are further supported by a network of student academic and financial support made available to county college students by RUN and, prospectively, supportive learning communities for such students once they arrive at RUN. This pathways approach also has been extended to Newark high schools through the Kresge-funded Pathway to Academic Achievement and Success program. 3 Rutgers University – Newark: Where Opportunity Meets Excellence Spring 2017 Update We have introduced new financial aid initiatives—increasing institutional funding and securing new external funds—and re-organized our existing financial support programs and communications efforts to align with our strategic plan and concomitant enrollment goals. This is evident in the following. o RUN to the TOP: This “last-dollar” financial aid program guarantees aid to completely cover full-time, in-state tuition and fees for admitted students whose adjusted gross family income is $60,000 or less and who are either a resident of Newark or a New Jersey resident transferring in with an associate’s degree from a New Jersey county college. 637 students benefited from this scholarship in fall 2016, the first semester in which it was available. This program also offers residential scholarships to all students admitted to our new Honors Living- Learning Community (HLLC), which benefited an additional 86 for fall 2016. o UndocuRutgers & TheDream.US: Created an event, now in its 3rd iteration (2014-15, 2015-16, 2016-17) for undocumented individuals and their families to promote knowledge of college options for this population of students and prospective students in northern NJ. For fall 2016, we added a scholarship option for undocumented students through a partnership with TheDream.US that provides $25,000 of support for eligible recipients, supplemented with RUN institutional funds. o Cooperman College Scholars: This is a partner program that supports academically talented, highly motivated students with financial need from Essex County, New Jersey, in their efforts to attain a four-year college degree. As one of four partner colleges, 14 of the 75 of the first cohort of CCS students attended Rutgers University-Newark for a summer college immersion experience prior to entering this upcoming fall 2016. The Scholars took courses led by RU-N college faculty, receive mentorship from current RU-N students, and experience on-campus living in student dormitories. Participants of the program also benefit from a scholarship to attend Rutgers University, as well as mentoring and other resources to give them a jumpstart in their first year at Rutgers University. o Second Chance Pell: In support of the over 500 students in the NJ STEP program, based at RUN, Rutgers University was selected as an experimental site for the US Department of Education's Second Chance Pell program. NJ STEP is an association of higher education institutions in New Jersey that works in partnership with the New Jersey Department of Corrections to provide higher education courses for students under the custody of the State while they are incarcerated and an opportunity to pursue a four year degree in a campus setting post-release. Second Chance Pell helps to make this program possible for participants who remain incarcerated.